Quotes & Sayings About Missing Your Family

You called?" Sounding casual is difficult when it feels like you're heart's river-dancing in your rib cage.
"Yes. I just wondered where you were. You didn't answer your cell. Is everything okay?" She sighs, but I can't tell if it's in relief or parental aggravation.
"Everything's fine. My battery is dead, but Galen bought me a charger to keep over here, so it's charging."
"How sweet of him," she says, knowing good and well she instructed him to do so. "Well, just wanted to check in. Should I wait up for you? I don't appreciate you missing curfew the last few nights. Technically, staying over there until four in the morning is a coed sleepover, which I don't allow, or had you forgotten? Your trip to Florida with Galen's family was a special circumstance."
"I stayed the night at Chloe's all the time with JJ there." JJ is Chloe's eight-year-old brother. Not a great comeback, but it will have to do. — Anna Banks

John Le Mesurier wishes it to be known that he conked out on November 15th. He sadly misses family and friends. — John Le Mesurier

I didn't miss out on a family life because of racing. I had one because of it. — Richard Petty

Iran has agreed to deepen our coordination as we work to locate Robert Levinson, missing from Iran for more than eight years. Even as we rejoice in the safe return of others, we will never forget about Bob. Each and every day our hearts are with the Levinson family, and we will not rest until their family is whole again. — Barack Obama

You don't become an 'artist' unless you've got something missing somewhere. Blaise Pascal called it a God-shaped hole. Everyone's got one but some are blacker and wider than others. It's a feeling of being abandoned,cut adrift in space and time-sometimes following the loss of a loved one. You can never completely fill that hole-you can try with songs,family,faith and by living a full life ... but when things are silent, you can still hear the hissing of what's missing. — Bono

Friends and family came and went, sometimes helping her with her tears, other times making her laugh. But even in her laughter there was something missing. She never seemed to be truly happy; she just seemed to be passing time while she waited for something else. She was tired of just existing; she wanted to live. But what was the point in living when there was no life in it? These questions went through her mind over and over until she reached the point of not wanting to wake up from her dreams
they were what felt real.
Deep down, she knew it was normal to feel like this, she didn't particularly think she was losing her mind. She knew that one day she would be happy again and that this feeling would just be a distant memory. It was getting to that day that was the hard part. — Cecelia Ahern

Three things happened in 1945. Daddy went missing, Annie started wetting the bed, and the Lester girl sang about Hitler in the middle of Sunday service. — Sarina Adeline

If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family. — Quentin Crisp

Her voice whispering love soothes him. They'd never done that before. Weren't that type of family. Except now he doesn't know what kind of family they are. What word is it that can define them? What would they call his family in the textbooks? Broken? He comes from a broken home. The Mackees can't be put back together again. There are too many pieces of them missing. — Melina Marchetta

Holy crap, Caleb! You're my uncle." Nick
"No!" Caleb
"It's worse. He's the half-brother of your great-grandfather." Kody
"You're not helping." Caleb
"No, but I'm entertaining myself at your adorable expense." Kody
"Yeah, y'all are missing the important fact. To a Cajun, that makes him my uncle." Nick
"Great. I always wanted to be a monkey's uncle. Nice to know I finally succeeded." Caleb — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I'm missing something, you know? That special 'sparkle' that ;life is supposed to bring. I have the job, the child, the family, the apartment and the friends, but I've lost the sparkle./ — Cecelia Ahern

But still, you know how it is when you're missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for. You hear a certain piece of music and right away you tell yourself that he could have changed his clothing style, could have gained a ton of weight, could have acquired a car and then parked that car in front of another family's house. "It's him!" you say. "He came! We knew he would; we always ... " But then you hear how pathetic you sound, and your words trail off into silence, and your heart breaks. — Anne Tyler

Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn't see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That's what mothers told her: Oh, you don't know what you're missing; it's spiritual; I feel closer to the earth, to the creator of all things. Perhaps all of that was true
it must be true
but Grace also knew that mothering was work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. She'd known too many women who'd vanished after childbirth; women whose hopes and fears had been pushed to the back of the family closet; women who'd magically been replaced by their children and their children's desires. — Sherman Alexie

Don't count on me to take you in because I'm angry. I'm angry at you for leading us on such a song and dance all these years, not just these few years but all the years, skipping all those holidays and staying away from beach trips and missing Mom and Dad's thirtieth anniversary and their thirty-fifth and Jeannie's baby and not attending my wedding that time or even sending a card or calling to wish me well. But most of all Denny, most of all: I will never forgive you for consuming every last little drop of our parents' attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us. — Anne Tyler

I am sober, grounded, focused, I'm writing again, I like where I am. I'm real positive and I got this great family that came along with my wife - I'm happily married and she's a great part of me that was missing - and I feel real good. — Joe Walsh

In some ways, I am able to feel more like a part of my family while I am missing them. It's normal to feel lonely when you are away from your loved ones, but it's queer to feel lonely while surrounded by family. — Rebecca Behrens

As is true in many families where children create enormously upsetting diversions from core family secrets, Elana's family fixed on her behavior as further proof that the secret should remain buried. When behavior is truly a distraction for the unspeakable, therapist after therapist may be brought in, each attempting to intervene at the wrong level, mistakenly addressing such signals at the biological, behavioral, intrapsychic, or interpersonal level, while completely missing the unimaginable maze of secrecy in which such actions are embedded. — Evan Imber-Black

I played a million different sports when I was growing up. I started when I was probably five or six, and we'd just go from activity to activity to activity. I think, finally, my parents just realized that we were missing something in our lives. They realized that it was time for us as a family to start going to church. — Sam Bradford

Another factor is the education and culture in which you grow up. I didn't grow up in the culture of victory, where you are expected to be or have to be, the best. It was not at all like that in my family. Tennis was really a hobby. If it led to something, great. If not, there were other things in life. I think that was something I was missing at some points in my career, because when I see Hingis or the Williamses, you see how they were educated for this: to win, to be the best, a bit the American mentality. Number one. Number one. Number one. I didn't have this. — Amelie Mauresmo

I've been away and haven't seen my family. I speak to them every day though. I miss them, but I love traveling. — Donna Karan

They can go about collecting every material thing of worldly value, but they're missing everything that truly counts. When you've got nothing else, family means everything to you. — Megan Thomason

I love you Tory. I know I say it a lot, but ... "
"I know baby. I feel the same way about you. Those words never convey what goes through my mind and heart every time I look up and see you sitting in my house. Funny thign is, I always thought my house was full and that there was nothing missing in my life. I had a job I loved. Family who loved me. Good friends to keep me sane. Everything a human could want. And t hen I met an infuriating, impossible man who added the one thing I didn't know wasn't there."
"Dirty socks on the floor?"
She laughed. "No, the other part of my heart. The last face I see before I go to sleep and the first one I see when I get up. I'm so glad it was you."
Those words both thrilled and scared him. Mostly because he knew firsthand that if love went untended it turned into profound hatred.
Tory and Acheron — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Halina tries to picture the American president seated triumphantly behind his desk some 6,000 kilometers west of them. V-E Day, Truman called it: Victory in Europe. But to Halina, the word victory feels hollow. False, even. here's hardly anything victorious about the ruined Warsaw they left, or about the fact that so much of the family is still missing, or about how all around them in what was once Lodz's massive ghetto, they can feel the ghosts of 200,000 Jews - most of whom, it's rumored, met their deaths in the gas vans and chambers of Chelmno and Auschwitz. — David Foenkinos

The advantage is I have my family with me all the time. When your daughter takes her first steps or says her first words and your son is going through potty training, I'm not missing any of those things. — Larry Dixon

Families are like puzzles. They fit together in a certain way, and if one piece is missing, it throws everything off. — Richard Schiff

Brother dear," I said, "did your soul leave your body while Amos was talking, or did you actually hear him? Egyptian gods real. Red Lord bad. Red Lord's birthday: very soon, very bad. House of Life: fussy magicians who hate our family because dad was a bit of a rebel, whom you could take a lesson from. Which leaves us - just us - with Dad missing, an evil god about to destroy the world, and an uncle who just jumped off the building - and I can't actually blame him." I took a breath. [Yes, Carter, I do have to breathe occasionally.] — Rick Riordan

Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, when asked how to strike a better balance between family, work and self-realisation says: You need the intention, good scheduling, and you have to be creative. If you don't find time to practice, one of the three is missing. — Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel

Did you say all that you meant to
Before the curtain closed?
Or did you feel so much more
Than we'll ever know?
You were an amazing person;
One of the very best.
You were here for part of my story;
I wish you could hear the rest.
I miss your smile most;
The smile you had for all.
Now I can only see it
In pictures on the wall. — Margo T. Rose

Honestly, I try to forget Fashion Week once it's over. I just want to go home and rest and just forget I even did it. It could drive you crazy! It's just show after show after show, and you're missing your family and they feel really far away. You don't go to sleep. You work for a month. — Chanel Iman

The amount of missing girls I've had to trace and their family and their friends always say the same thing. 'She was a bright and affectionate disposition and had no men friends'. That's never true. It's unnatural. Girls ought to have men friends. If not, then there's something wrong about them ... — Agatha Christie

For tea she went down to see Misses Spink and Forcible. She had three digestive biscuits, a glass of limeade, and a cup of weak tea. The limeade was very interesting. It didn't taste anything like limes. It tasted bright green and vaguely chemical. Coraline liked it enormously. She wished they had it at home.
"How are your dear mother and father?" asked Miss Spink.
"Missing," said Coraline. "I haven't seen either of them since yesterday. I'm on my own. I think I've probably become a single child family. — Neil Gaiman

I've known since the first moment I saw you and every day after has only made me surer. I see who you are, right down to your soul. I know you're the kind of woman who gives of herself, completely. I know the promises you make mean more to you than the cost. I know that family is the most important thing to you in the entire world. But most of all, I know that you feel exactly the same thing I do - we belong together, Del. You're the piece of me that's been missing all my life and I can tell just looking that I'm the same for you. — Dee Tenorio

You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash. — Don DeLillo

It's hard when you're missing your family. You wake up every morning like someone took one of your legs. — Lemony Snicket

Growing up in my family meant ambushes on your birthday, crossbows for Christmas, and games of dodge ball where the balls were occasionally rigged to explode. It also meant learning how to work your way out of a wide variety of death traps. Failure to get loose on your own could lead to missing dinner, or worse, being forced to admit that you missed dinner because your baby sister had tied you to the couch. Again. — Seanan McGuire

Douglas, you have an incredible capacity for missing the point. Will you listen to me, just for once? The debate does not matter. It's not about the issues. Albie might have been naive or ridiculous or pompous or all of those things, but you apologized. You said you were embarassed by him. You took the side of a bunch of arms-dealers! Bloddy bastard arms-dealers against your son - our son - and that was wrong, it was the wrong thing to do, because in a fight you side with the people you love. That's just how it is. — David Nicholls

Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned. — Han Kang

Father's Day was great, but all the family gatherings brought up my mother's death. Maybe it's me, because I am a wimp. We would get together, but there was someone missing! — Doug Davidson

You can read the best experts on child care. You can listen to those who have been there. You can take a whole childbirth and child-care course without missing a lesson. But you won't really know a thing about yourselves and each other as parents, or your baby as a child, until you have her in your arms. That's the moment when the lifelong process of bringing up a child into the fold of the family begins. — Stella Chess

My family is the thing I miss most on the tour. — Roger Federer

My family was a bunch of drunks. When I was six I came up missing, they put my picture on a bottle of scotch. — Rodney Dangerfield

The hardest thing about moving to California from Connecticut was just missing my family. If I went back, it would be just because I was homesick. — Kevin Nealon

Now you can all have a wish
the Moomin family first!"
Moominmamma hesitated a bit. "Should it be something you can see?" she asked, "or an idea? If you know what I mean, Mr. Hobgoblin?"
"Oh, yes!" said the Hobgoblin. "Things are easier of course, but it will work with an idea too."
"Then I want to wish that Moomintroll will stop missing Snufkin," said Moominmamma.
"Oh, dear!" said Moomintroll going pink, "I didn't know it was so obvious!"
But the Hobgoblin waved his cloak once, and immediately the sadness flew out of Moomintroll's heart. His longing just became an expectancy, and that felt much better. — Tove Jansson

When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run ... — Russell D. Moore

Ben...hadn't known fear or despair or loss of control in his comfortable middle-class family. Bonnie could teach him a lot that was missing from his character. And he could give her a degree of stability and confidence. Knowing it was sentimental, Simmy nonetheless felt that this was a perfect match, which she would do well to safeguard to the best of her ability. Ben would teach Bonnie to tread more carefully and to think more logically. Each would help the other to grow up. — Rebecca Tope

Oh Come All Ye Faithful "Occum" Claus stood a head taller than most of the other men at the party. Like most of his crazy family, he wore a Santa suit, only the coat of his outfit was missing, exposing suspenders and a sleeveless white tank top. The man was heavily muscled and looked angry; a mixture of holiday cheer and a Navy SEAL having a really bad day. He was the picture that went along with the headline "Christmas Nightmare" or "Crazed Santa Attacks Orphans with Fire Ax. — Elizabeth Gannon

We visit the Launch Control building, where on one wall of the seventies-style lobby are hung the mission patches of every human spaceflight that has ever been launched from here, 149 to date. Beneath each mission patch is a small plaque showing the launch and landing dates. Two of them - Challenger's STS-51L and Columbia's STS-107 - are missing landing dates, because both of these missions ended in disasters that destroyed the orbiters and killed their crews. The blank spaces on the wall where those landing dates should have been are discolored from the touch of people's hands. This would be unremarkable if this place were a tourist attraction, or regularly open to the public. But with the rare exception of Family Days, this building is open only to people who work here. In other words, it's launch controllers, managers, and engineers who have been touching these empty spaces with their hands, on their way to and from doing their jobs. After — Margaret Lazarus Dean

I'm very attached to my family and protective of them and miss them, and that situation, my connection with that can make me become very vulnerable. — Jimmy Cliff

When a writer is born into a family, Czeslaw Milosz once famously said, the family is finished. You could forget about having any more secrets. You could forget about hiding what you didn't want others to know. You were going to be exposed, hung out to air, and by a traitor from within. But later I wondered, Is it the family that's really finished or simply the writer's place within it? Could a family still be a family with parts missing? — Judith Freeman

I believe that we are missing a great opportunity. We as Republicans are not really emphasizing what brings us together, and that's conservative values: love of the country. Love of family. Personal responsibility. Hard work. Optimism. Those are the things that we should be communicating to Latinos, and we're doing that very poorly. — Lionel Sosa

This man was a rogue, not because circumstances forced him to be a criminal but because he was born that way. He was probably conning his mother out of her milk the moment he could grin. He'd charm the clothes off a virgin in twenty minutes. And if the poor fool took him home, he'd drink her dad under the table, beguile her mother, charm her grandparents, and treat the girl to a night she'd never forget. In the morning, her dad would be sick with alcohol poisoning, the good silver would be missing together with the family car, and in a month, both the former virgin and her mother would be expecting. — Ilona Andrews

I definitely miss New Zealand. Mainly friends and family. — Bret McKenzie

For those of you who think that I have my life altogether, I definitely do not. Every season brings new challenges. For example, since I had my fifth child, I am notoriously 5-10 minutes late everywhere no matter how hard I try to be on time. I would like to say that I am "fashionably" late, but that isn't the truth either. Running in a mad dash in a parking lot (all holding hands of course) to make it somewhere 5 minutes late (instead of 6 minutes cause that makes a big difference) while one child is missing shoes and my hair is going in every direction. Yep, that is my family. — Tamara L. Chilver

My whole family is missing that sports gene. I hope I didn't screw that up by marrying a great golfer. — Penn Jillette

I was hoping they would put up flyers like they do for lost cats." He said. "Missing, one stunningly attractive teenage boy. Answers to 'Jace' or 'hotstuff'."
"You did not just say that."
"You don't like 'hotstuff'? You think 'sweet cheeks' might be better? "Love crumpet'? Really? That last one's stretching it a bit. Though, technically my family is British- — Cassandra Clare

The time of minor poets is coming. Good-by Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine ... While the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you're making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might've thrown them out with last spring's cleaning.
It's snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing. — Charles Simic

But I just felt at one point that I was on a hamster wheel, you know? Just doing movie after movie and thinking so much about career related things and I think missing out on hanging with my friends and family as much I needed to. — Woody Harrelson

The culture doesn't encourage you to think about such things until you're about to die. We're so wrapped up with egostical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks. We're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going . So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing? — Morrie Schwartz.

I've worked with farmers in Zimbabwe who've lost their lands. I've worked with people in Venezuela, under threat of kidnappings, whose external world is unstable. But they have very strong social connections with their family and friends. And as a result, they're able to maintain a greater level of happiness and optimism than I've seen from bankers, consultants, or salespeople who are on the road all the time, who follow jobs separated from their families, and, as a result, find themselves missing out on the happiness that comes from those very connections that they severed. — Shawn Achor

I see a couple of things missing. Any society, any community, even in the family, when the elders don't do their jobs, the youth suffer. We have no done our job. I'm saying anybody 55 and up. We didn't teach people the basic things. — Iyanla Vanzant

That sense of family. And the way that we all interact and collaborate together. It's really gonna be something I'm gonna miss. — Meaghan Rath

Like any collection of family photographs, it was a random selection that told only fragments of a story. The real tale would be revealed by the pictures that were missing or never even taken at all, not the ones that had been so carefully framed or packed away neatly in an envelope. — Victoria Hislop

A missing arm might ruin your symmetry. Personal asymmetry where I come from is a big taboo and brings great shame on the family and sometimes even the whole village."
"Do you then have to kill yourself over it or something?"
"Goodness me, no! The family and village just have to learn to be ashamed
and nuts to them for being so oversensitive. — Jasper Fforde

These people, they were different to anyone I'd met. They'd offered their friendship, their trust, without a second thought. I'd always been wary about new people in my life. That same old barrier I put up to protect myself. I didn't let anyone close enough to be able to hurt me. My father had left, as though I was as insubstantial as air. As a child, I'd struggled to come to terms with it. He'd been there every single day, and then he wasn't. So what were we to him? A stopgap until something he determined as better came along? With the Aunt Margot feud, and subsequent alienation of the family, it felt as though people abandoned us like we were yesterday's newspaper. Could I fall into friendships with these girls, and then leave? Maybe it was time for me to stop worrying about anything other than living in the moment. I was missing out on so much, standing on the edge of life, waiting for something that might never happen. — Rebecca Raisin